Lola Koller, Tarek el Sehity and Jaan Valsiner from Sigmund Freud Private University Vienna win the EQUA Best Paper Award 2025 for their contribution ‘The Limbus of the Third Family Business Generation from a Family Psychology Perspective’. The Best Paper Award, endowed with €1,000, was presented to Lola Koller by Dr Rena Haftlmeier-Seiffert during a ceremony at the FIFU conference.
EQUA Foundation Honors Scientific Excellence
At the 14th Conference of German-speaking Research Centres and Institutes for Family Businesses (FIFU), the research team was honoured by the EQUA Foundation for their outstanding paper. The EQUA Foundation supports scientific projects that deal with the special features of family businesses and business families. In addition to the award for the best paper, the team received a Fast Track Review in the Journal of Family Business Strategy for their work, which further emphasises the relevance and scientific quality of their work.
Research on the Third Generation in Family Businesses
Lola Koller, PhD student at SFU Vienna, was honoured together with Tarek el Sehity and Jaan Valsiner with the prestigious EQUA Award 2025 for their scientific work in the field of family psychology of business families. Together with Assistant Professor Dr Tarek el Sehity, head of the International Business & Economic Psychology emphasis in SFU’s Psychology Master programme and Professor Dr Jaan Valsiner, she has been conducting research in the award-winning project ‘The Limbus of the Third Family Business Generation from a Family Psychological Perspective’ since 2024.
The research project investigates how business families deal with increasing generational complexity from the third generation onwards. The study provides important insights into how younger business families can adapt their decision-making, communication and conflict resolution strategies in order to remain successful in the long term.
About Lola Koller
Lola Koller completed both her Bachelor of Science in Psychology and her Master of Science with an emphasis in Business Psychology at Sigmund Freud Private University Vienna. In the team of Assistant Professor Tarek el Sehity for Business Psychology, she gained early experience in interdisciplinary research and took over the study management for a joint project with Porsche AG on the psychology of autonomous driving for her master’s thesis at SFU. In addition to her doctorate on the psychology of family businesses, she researches and teaches in the fields of team and leadership psychology.
